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Wake - A Private Space to Discuss Design Work

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One of the most important things during the design process is feedback. Collaborating with your team, designers, product managers and engineers is vital for a great execution. The process is certainly much easier said than done however. From the chaos, countless emails, presentations, printed boards, to you name it, a centralized service is long overdue and that's what Wake was created to streamline, "A private space to share and discuss design work with your team".

What is Wake?

Wake is an enterprise web, desktop and mobile platform that makes it super easy for designers to share work and collect feedback from their team. It was created by former Facebook product designer Chris Kalani and the Norwegian digital agency Bakken & Baeck.

We built Wake because we couldn’t find anything that would allow us to quickly share visual work as a team. Our communication was fragmented across different apps and nothing allowed us to seamlessly capture our design process. Slack, email, IM, Flowdock, HipChat and Basecamp were great for text­based communication. But none of these tools were designed for the type of work we do. We needed something that would allow us to freely share ideas while keeping everyone in the loop.

“Wake has filled the gap between formal design reviews at Medium in a collaborative and lightweight way. It has increased transparency, continuity, and communication during our design process. We love it.” — Dustin Senos, Head of Design at Medium

Quick History

The guys behind Wake started building their first prototype in January 2014 to solve the needs of Bakken & Baeck.The product was well received and quickly became an irreplaceable tool for the team. With the success of their own internal usage and the growing interest from external parties, they decided to spin Wake off into its own company. In August they announced a private beta and received nearly 2,000 invite requests within the first day. Since then, they’ve been working with about 70 companies, observing usage and iterating on their feedback. These companies include teams within Yahoo, Twitter, Cisco, Artsy, Medium, and BuzzFeed. Along with dozens of great startups and several large Scandinavian media companies.

Written by

I'm a Brazilian product designer based in Oakland, California currently working for Google as a Staff Designer. I am also the founder of Abduzeedo, an award-winning digital publication about design and a personal project that has become the source of inspiration for millions of designers and enthusiasts.

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One of the most important things during the design process is feedback. Collaborating with your team, designers, product managers and engineers is vital for a great execution. The process is certainly much easier said than done however.